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June 25, 2010

Note from Con Slobodchikoff: This is a guest post by Randall Johnson, who has been a frequent contributor to the Reconnect With Nature Blog and the Dog Behavior Blog.

Not long ago, I received an e-mail from a friend of mine who has dedicated almost 30 years of her life to protecting a large tract of the Amazon rainforest outside of Iquitos, Peru. She told me that in the early part of May, six pink river dolphins, or 'botos', Inia geoffrensis, had been found dead on the Ucayali River and evidence suggested they had been victims of commercial fishermen who had recently passed through area. Having spent a lot of time in that region in the early '90s, I felt a twinge of sadness and regret because I remember how that part of the forest used to be relatively unspoiled.

LAGOA DA PRATA BOTOS (Photo Credit: Randall Johnson) Photographed in a clearwater lake in Brazil, this boto, Inia geoffrensis, displays its long beak, small eye, a paddle-shaped flipper, and dorsal ridge. Because their cervical vertebrae are not fused together, as in marine dolphins, botos can bend their necks to an angle of 90° to its body, downward or sideways, and some of this flexibility can be inferred by the neck folds. Although their eyes appear small, in the skull they are just as big as those of marine dolphins and their eyesight is surprisingly good, with aquarium-held animals having proved capable of recognizing people by vision alone. In murky waters, however, they rely on a highly-developed echolocation system to navigate and find food and there is some evidence that they may be capable of stunning prey fish by using sonic bursts produced by their melon, a separate organ on their foreheads (visible in the photo), the shape of which can be altered at will.

LAGOA DA PRATA BOTOS (Photo Credit: Randall Johnson) Also known as the "pink dolphin", botos that spend a lot of time in clearwater lakes or tributaries tend to be uniformly gray, which is thought to be the skin's reaction to more constant exposure to sunlight. In murkier waters, adults often display some degree of pink coloration, ranging from completely pink to pink swashes and patches, with the rest of the body a medium to light gray. The boto pair in the photo, identified as male and female, typifies that most Inia sighted in the wild are single individuals or pairs, usually mother and calf. Although little is known about the social lives of these animals, their social organization seems to be intricately linked to the seasonal rising and falling of the water level, with dolphins dispersing during the high water, or flood, season and regrouping during the low-water, or dry, season. Coordinated fishing has been reported, sometimes involving tuxuxi dolphins and giant river otters, and the author of this post has also documented that botos practice food-sharing.

This latest report of river dolphin deaths may seem insignificant at first glance, but it drove home the point that the world's freshwater dolphins are the most endangered cetaceans, with their populations in decline, mostly as a result of human activities and impacts on their habitats.In fact, one species, the baiji, or Yangtze River dolphin, was declared 'functionally extinct' when an international team of researchers failed to find a single dolphin during a 2006 survey expedition.

At about the same time, an ambitious two-year-long river dolphin census was getting underway in South America, involving 13 rivers and covering five nations and 3,600 km of rivers. Led by Fernando Trujillo, scientific director of the Omacha Foundation (Colombia) and financed by WWF Switzerland and WWF LAC's Freshwater Program, the census recorded 3,188 botos and tucuxi dolphins, Sotalia fluviatilis.

"This census gives us a baseline population for these species and gives us an insight into the state of the ecosystems they inhabit," said Trujillo. "These results also provide the foundation for designing an evaluation and monitoring program for South American river dolphins."

A new method for surveying river dolphins, developed for the purpose of this census, was certified by whale experts from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and eighteen professionals were trained in it before getting started.

The survey confirmed the major threats faced by these dolphins: pollution from farming, industry, and mining; hydroelectric development; boat traffic and disturbance; prey depletion due to over-fishing; and incidental mortality in fishing nets.

A relatively new and particularly serious threat was also identified: in parts of Peru and Brazil, botos are being deliberately killed and their decomposing carcasses are used as bait to attract a variety of catfish (mota fish), making it easier to catch this commercially valuable species. For instance, between 800 and 1,200 pounds of mota fish came be captured in two hours using a two-meter long boto.

This practice is growing at an alarming rate and hundreds of dolphins are being killed each year in Peru and Brazil for mota fisheries alone. It now represents a serious threat that needs to be addressed to prevent unrecoverable damage to the affected dolphin populations.

In the past, Amazon River dolphins were protected by a body of legends and beliefs that accredited them with magic powers. There is, for instance, a widespread belief that the boto is a shape shifter, or encantado, who transforms into an irresistibly handsome young man and seduces young women. [Children born with certain birth defects are believed to be the offspring of a boto and women who conceive while their husbands are away can blame the dolphin.]

Many locals don't kill or eat dolphins because they are believed to carry the souls of the dead. In other locations, dolphins aren't killed because to do so would bring bad luck or misfortune.

And the tucuxi dolphin is thought to be a kind of "brujo", or wizard, which is either feared or revered, depending on the tributary. [I know this to be true based on personal conversations I had in Peru.]

However, commercial fishermen come from areas that don't share these beliefs. Their bottom line is profit-driven, so they aren't deterred by the dolphins' legendary powers.

Sadly, even local fishermen are now killing botos because they see them as competitors for a diminishing supply of fish, even though there is only a small degree of overlap between the species of fish eaten by dolphins and the species of fish eaten by humans.

According to the IUCN's 2008 Red List, we are facing an "extinction crisis", with almost one in four [mammals] at risk of disappearing forever. The study showed that at least 1,141 of the 5,487 known mammals on Earth are known to be threatened with extinction and the world's remaining river dolphins are prominently featured among them.

Given that they are top predators in their ecosystems, river dolphins are not only visible indicators of the overall health of the rivers in which they live, but they are essential tomaintaining the delicate balance of the entire ecosystem. Removing top predators---something our species is quite adept as doing--can set off the eventual collapse of the ecosystem they occupy with disastrous results that ultimately affect human populations. How many times do we need to learn this lesson before it finally sinks in?

March 24, 2010

In the 1866 classic, Toilers of the Sea, French writer Victor Hugo called it a 'devil fish' and described it as "disease shaped into monstrosity".

A little more than a century later, another famous Frenchman, oceanographer Jacque-Yves Cousteau, dedicated an entire book to the devil-fish and called it a "soft intelligence".

The subject of these two diametrically-opposed descriptions is the octopus, a mollusk which, along with squids and cuttlefish, is considered by marine scientists to be the most intelligent invertebrate.

Although biologists continue to debate the extent of their intelligence and learning abilities, numerous maze and problem-solving experiments have shown that the octopus has both long-and short-term memories, despite the fact that its brain contains far fewer brain cells and has a much simpler anatomical organization than that of the vertebrate brain.

Now, thanks to almost a decade of underwater research by Australia's Museum Victoria, the results of which were published in a recent issue of Current Biology, the octopus joins a growing list of animals that use tools, which not so long ago was considered to be an exclusively human trait.

Twenty veined octopuses (Amphioctopus marginatus) were filmed for a total of 500 diver hours between 1999 and 2008 off the coasts of Northern Sulawesi and Bali in Indonesia. During that time, four individuals were seen to collect discarded coconut shells that have become a regular feature of the sea bed in the study area and deftly remove accumulated mud and sediment. Then, they turned the shells over so the open side faced upward. If they'd collected two shells, they stacked one inside the other and spread themselves over the assembled shells, raised them up by stiffening their muscular arms, and quickly scuttled away using what researchers call "stilt walking".

The coconut shells are ultimately used as a protective shelter against predators in a part of the sea bed where there are few places for the mollusks to hide. If the octopus has one shell, it turns it over and crawls underneath. If, however, it secured two shells, it assembles them back into their whole coconut form and hides inside.

One of the researchers involved in the study, Prof. Tom Tregenza, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Exeter, UK, says: "A tool is something an animal carries around and then uses on a particular occasion for a particular purpose.

He then equates the coconut-carrying octopus to people walking around with a closed umbrella."While the octopus carries the coconut around, there is no use to it - no more use than an umbrella is to you when you have it folded up and you are carrying it about. The umbrella only becomes useful when you lift it above your head and open it up. And just in the same way, the coconut becomes useful to this octopus when it stops and turns it the other way up and climbs inside it."

The researchers concluded that the collection and use of objects by animals is likely to form a continuum stretching from insects to primates [shades of Darwin!] and that the definition of tools will continue to provide fodder for ongoing debate.

Of course, the octopus is reputed to be intelligent, however one defines it. It's long been known capable of figuring out how to unscrew the top of a glass jar to access to the tasty crab inside.

More recently, some octopus species in the Indonesians waters, and at least one species in the Atlantic Ocean, have been shown to have exceptional camouflaging abilities by mimicking flounders in form, coloration, and swimming speed to avoid predators, who consider flounders too tough to tackle--literally.

Without a doubt, the octopus has any number of secrets yet to be revealed…and the ones that science has managed to penetrate will continue to motivate ongoing investigations into the capabilities of the ocean's mysterious "soft intelligence".

For readers who want to read the published paper, here is the citation:Julian K. Finn, Tom Tregenza, Mark D. Norman. Defensive tool use in a coconut-carrying octopus. Current Biology, 2009.A soundless video of a coconut-carrying octopus can be seen at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8408233.stm

February 23, 2010

In a forest reserve in the savannah-like "Cerrado" biome of Central Brazil, an amazing display of planning, learning, and sophisticated tool use has been documented in a species of New World monkeys. Wild capuchin monkeys (Cebus libidinosus)— a species familiar to many as organ grinders—move along the ground, methodically tapping palm nuts that are produced at ground level to see if they are ripe. Those that pass the test are carried up into trees, where their outer cases are removed and the exposed nuts are dropped on the ground for two or three days to dry.

Then, the aged palm nuts are collected and carried to a separate nut-cracking area. There, the monkeys climb up on top of flat rocks or boulders and, using large stones they have previously selected, they start pounding the hard-shelled nuts, with the stones being used as a hammer and the boulder as an anvil. After a few whacks, the shells are broken and the monkeys extract the kernels.

The entire process involves several days of testing, harvesting, transporting, and hammering and appears to be a planned activity—a part of the monkeys' culture—that takes place year-round.

This discovery, first reported in The American Journal of Primatology (December 2004) by a multinational research team led by Dorothy Fragaszy, a psychologist with the University of Georgia, is remarkable in that, up to that time, routine tool use in wild primates had been routinely ascribed only to chimpanzees and orangutans and, although there had been anecdotal reports of tool-using capuchins dating back to the sixteenth century, this was the first time such behavior had been scientifically documented.

Furthermore, although the stone hammers had not been fashioned in any way, their use to open encapsulated nuts is recognized as being a complex form of tool use. A number of factors (i.e., material, resistance, friability, shape, and weight) affect an object's suitability to open a hard-shelled nut, with weight being one of the most important. The heavier the object, the fewer strikes are required to crack open a nut.

Fragaszy and her colleagues originally estimated that the stone hammers weighed 16 ounces, but in a subsequent trip, they were found to weigh over two pounds. Given that adult capuchins weigh between 6-8 pounds, they were selecting—and lifting—stones a third and sometime half their own body weight.

The effective use of hammer and anvil is seen only in adults. Although juvenile capuchins are interested in the activity and often play with the procedure, they are not effective at it. It takes years of practice—and maturation—to become effective at cracking open palm nuts with the properly chosen stone.

If you would like to see a video of this extraordinary behavior, go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-G60UCeXFp0&feature=player_embedded. It's an excerpt from a BBC documentary entitled "Clever Monkey", narrated by Sir David Attenborough. In his closing remark, note his reference to these monkeys as being another intelligent species on Earth.

February 07, 2010

Given that RWNB ended 2009 with a post about ants, it seemed fitting to start the New Year with another post featuring these fascinating insects.

A study done by German scientists, led by Harald Wolf, professor of neurobiology at the University of Ulm, suggests that desert-dwelling ants may have "pedometer-like" cells in their brains that enable them to count their steps and that they use this unique navigational skill to find their way back to the nest after foraging for food.

But why desert ants? Because most ants live in places that allow them to lay a scent trail on the ground that show other ants how to get to food and back home.Scent trails, however, don't work in the desert; the constantly shifting sand scatters smells almost immediately.

So how do these ants find their way back to their nest with such unerring accuracy? It's already known that ants can use the position of the sun and the pattern of polarized light as a kind of 'celestial compass', but that doesn't explain how they determine distances with such precision.

To try to unravel this mystery, Wolf and his assistant, Matthias Whittlinger, trained two groups of Sahara desert ants to find a food site 10 meters from their nest. While the ants were busy eating, the scientists removed them and divided into three groups.

One group was left alone. The second group had pre-cut pig bristles superglued to each of their six legs, effectively giving them stilts. Ants in the third group had their lower leg segments cut off, thus making each leg shorter. (This part of the experience has since drawn some criticism. It should be noted, though, that in the wild, these segments often dry up and break off naturally without interfering with the ants' ability to walk long distances.)

The ants were then released to make their way back to the nest. The scientists watched to see what would happen. If there really was a step-counting mechanism at work, then the ants whose strides had been altered would have their calculations thrown off.

And that’s exactly what happened.The normal ants walked right up to the nest and went inside. The stilt-leg ants, using giant steps, walked past the entrance and stopped 15 meters away. The stump-legged ants, using baby steps, stopped short of the entrance by almost 5 meters. Yet, all three groups had walked exactly the same number of steps back from the food site.

Interestingly, when the ants went out again in search of food, the two groups with altered gaits had no trouble judging the correct distance back to the nest.

Of course, this doesn't mean Sahara ants are actually counting their steps as "one, two, three, four, five," and so forth, the way we would. More likely, Wolfe explains, there is a neural mechanism at work that converts the motor excitation caused by each stride into a measure of distance.

Still, it's an ingenious solution to not being able to lay scent trails and it shows there is still much to be learned from even the humblest of creatures.

August 31, 2009

This is a post from Guest Author Randall Johnson, who has contributed a number
of guest posts and comments to this blog.

A few weeks ago, I came across a news item that got me thinking about
the extremes our current level of separation from the natural world can
sometimes carry us.

It seems a small town in Massachusetts
acquired an unofficial mascot a few months ago in the form of a wild turkey,
which the townspeople named ‘Freddy’. He strutted around town freely, visiting
local businesses, going in and out of stores, and getting hand-outs along the
way. He became something of a local celebrity, having attracting local media
attention through his ‘friendly’ behavior.

However, in early August, the local police found it necessary to
apprehend and euthanize Freddy after he was declared a public safety hazard for
having attacked motorcyclists and passersby. Afterwards, the town held a
memorial service for its beloved bird, with mourners leaving flowers and notes.
One resident even set up a Facebook page in Freddy’s honor with over 1,500
friends and counting.

What the townspeople may not have known is wild turkeys can be aggressive
when they lose their fear of people and, after several months of urban living,
Freddy had become pretty much fearless. As such, he wasn’t an ideal candidate
for relocation, as was pointed out by local wildlife officials.

Now, there was nothing unusual or out-of-the-ordinary about Freddy’s
behavior, considering he’d become habituated to humans and vehicular traffic. However,
the fact that some of the town’s citizens organized and participated in a memorial
service for him gave me pause for reflection. It struck me that the energy and
emotion that went into this act of mourning was disproportionate to the
situation.

Granted, wild turkeys are the official game bird of Massachusetts.

Granted, by 1851, they had been wiped out from the state as a result of
hunting.

However, in 1972-1973, the state Division of Fisheries and Wildlife launched
a successful reintroduction program, starting with 37 turkeys. Today, the
turkey population in Massachusetts
is somewhere between 20,000-25,000!

So, they’re not threatened with imminent extinction, unlike the 16,300
or so plant and animal species that appear on the World Conservation Union’s
2007 Red List of Threatened Species.

Let’s put this into perspective even more.

Wild turkeys grow to be 4 feet tall and weigh around 20 pounds. Not exactly
lightweights! Following their reintroduction, they surprised everyone—including
wildlife officials—by being adaptable to residential, even urban, living, with
thriving populations in Boston and Cambridge. They are
opportunistic feeders, eating everything from bird seed to gutter trash, and
then depositing large amounts of ‘scat’ all over the place.

Some residents report being happy to see a bit a nature strolling
around, whereas others are wary, even afraid, of what these sometimes ornery
birds might do, especially when children are around. More than a few people
have even reported being terrorized by them, prompting local police to issue
guidelines about what to do—and not to do—should people meet a wild turkey on
the sidewalk.

It strikes me that reintroduction programs can be a double-edge sword. Yes,
Massachusetts
got its turkeys back after more than one hundred ‘turkey-less’ years. But now
many of the state’s communities have a new public health and safety issue to
deal with that the Fisheries and Wildlife biologists hadn’t counted on.

At the individual level, some people’s need for contact with nature
leads to maudlin displays of sentimentality that make for good headlines but that’s
about all.

There’s no question that we need to exercise a healthy dose of
compassion in our treatment of other species. After all, humans are now the
leading cause of extinction. But in addition to using our hearts, we also need
to use our heads.

August 11, 2009

This is a post from Guest Author Randall Johnson, who has contributed a number of guest posts and comments to this blog.

Reconnecting with nature may take some unexpected twists and turns along
the way, but who would have thought Aesop’s Fables would turn out to one of
them? That’s right. The ancient Greek story-teller credited with collecting
such timeless fables as “The Tortoise and the Hare” and “The Boy Who Cried
Wolf”, each with a moral lesson at the end, may also have been a keen observer
of bird behavior.

In “The Crow and the Pitcher”, a thirsty crow comes across a pitcher
with water at the bottom, beyond the reach of its beak. After failing to push
the pitcher over, the crow drops in pebbles, one by one, until the water rises
to the top, allowing the bird to drink. (The moral of the story: Necessity is
the mother of invention.)

Well, it turns out that this is more than just an old fable. Researchers
Christopher Bird of the University of Cambridge and Nathan Emery of Queen Mary
University of London have reported in the current issue of Current Biology that
rooks, another corvid and a relative of the crow, are able to use stones to
raise the level of water in a plastic container to reach a floating worm.

Bird and Emery experimented on four rooks by presenting them with a
clear tube partly filled with water and a worm floating on top, and a nearby
pile of stones of varying sizes. The birds spontaneously dropped stones into
the water and seemed to estimate how many stones would be needed. They also
quickly learned bigger stones worked better than smaller ones.

Although some species of crows have been proven to use tools in the
wild, rooks do not. They don’t have to as they have easy access to food, like
carrion. But in an experimental situation like this one, they easily figured
out how to use the stones to reach the worm.

Says Mr. Bird, “It was a remarkable combination of some understanding of
the task with really rapid learning.”In
the summary of their published paper, Bird and Emery state, “This behavior
demonstrates a flexible ability to use tools, a finding with implications for
the evolution of tool use and cognition in animals.”

The more we take time to watch animals, the better we see how much we share
in common with them, including brain power, and how this common thread firmly
and solidly connects us to the natural world that supports us all.

Now, I seem to recall Aesop also told a story about the goose that laid
golden eggs. Well, if such a fabled fowl should also exist and find its way to
my door, that’s one story you won’t read about in Current Biology. I’ll keep
that one all to myself.

July 28, 2009

Note from Con Slobodchikoff: This is a post by guest author Randall Johnson, who has been a frequent commentator on this blog, as well as a frequent guest author and commentator on the Dog Behavior Blog.

Finding a way to reconnect
with nature can take place on a grand scale by walking through a tropical
rainforest and feeling, rather than seeing, the immense variety of life it
supports, swimming with free-ranging dolphins, or, say, coming face-to-face
with a great whale. However, more often than not, it’s the everyday, seemingly
mundane, events happening around us that have the power to call us back from
our artificial steel-and-concrete world and ‘ground’ us, as it were, in the
natural world.

A few years back, my wife
and I bought a weekend / vacation home in her hometown, Lagoa da Prata, a small
town in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais.At the time, we were living in Belo
Horizonte, the state capital, working as teachers and
translators and coping with the all the stress that goes along with big city
life.

The house was part of a
new development on a large tract of land that used to be part of the town’s biggest
dairy farm and the setting clearly reflected its past: a long stretch of dirt
road ran in front of the house led to the colonial-style farm house and then
into a patch of dense forest. On one side of the road, there was a wide expanse
of open meadow and on the other side, behind the house, a huge fenced-in cow
pasture.

Shortly after buying the
house, we were ‘adopted’ by a scrawny little street dog with short dull gray
fur that my wife decided to call Suzie. Following a couple of days of eating
kibble and drinking fresh water, Suzie underwent an amazing transformation:her gray fur was replaced by a glossy, uniformly
black coat.(She was later identified by
a friend of mine as a miniature pinscher, although with a non-standard color
pattern.)

We soon discovered Suzie
had a friend—a short scruffy male who looked a bit like Toto from The Wizard of Oz , except his fur was
dirty-white. After trying several names, including Toto, we settled on Toby. Unlike Suzie, though, Toby showed no interest
in being adopted. He hung out with us
while we were at the house and we gave him food and water. Sometimes, he took an afternoon nap inside the
house, but he rarely slept there at night.

Anyway, my wife and I got
into the routine of taking a walk down the dirt road early in the morning and
again in the evening, right before sunset. Suzie and Toby invariably
accompanied us.

As we
strolled along, I watched SuzieandToby as they ran through meadow, Suzie leaping through
the tall grass like a gazelle.Toby was
less graceful, but he kept up as they chased after butterflies and small birds.
Sometimes it looked as they were running for the sheer joy of it.Once in while, they teamed up to harass the
cows on the other side of the road, yapping and lunging at them, and then they’d
take off again. It looked like a pleasant diversion (from their perspective,
not from the cows’), maybe even a kind of adrenalin rush, because if a bull
happened to be nearby, he wouldn’t hesitate to charge after them.

These were
moments of boundless exhilaration. They were being themselves, having fun, unfettered
by other worries or concerns, enjoying the “here and now”, which is something
we 21st century humans often have trouble doing, even in small,
rural towns. They were wild hearts and free spirits, very much part of the
world we share together, but more viscerally attuned to it.

Walking
down that country road was one way of seeking a reconnection with nature, but
the active ingredient, the ‘bridge’ that made the connection real, was watching
Suzie and Toby’s innocent, high-spirited capers as they gave me a glimpse of a purer,
more primal connection that I myself cannot feel with the same intensity. Still,
occasional glimpses have been enough to keep me grounded, and by reminding us that
we are, first and foremost, products of the natural world, our companion
animals may yet have another useful service to offer us.

July 19, 2009

Last night I went to see Harry Potter and found the movie to be completely boring. I had read Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince when it came out in 2006, so I had some idea of the story. A couple of friends who came with me to the theater had never read the book, found themselves clueless, and left half-way through (perhaps that’s where the Half comes in).

Even though I knew the general story line, I found the progression of the scenes to be tedious. I guess I expect a movie to actually have a story that takes the viewer through from beginning to end, and not just a collection of scenes that are a trip down memory lane.

Even with knowing the general story, I found it hard to figure out why one scene followed another. Gone was the richness of plot found in the original book. Gone were some of the interesting characters. Gone was a sense of action and vitality.

But since this is a blog about reconnecting with nature, I started to think about the parallel between this film and watching nature. For some, watching nature can be excruciatingly boring. For others, it can be very exciting. Same thing with the Potter film.

So why is watching nature really exciting for me, while watching Potter was extremely boring?

My answer is simple. In my opinion, movies are supposed to have a story. I don’t go to movies to watch a bunch of unconnected scenes that flash across the screen. I expect to have an organized plot, with a beginning, a middle, and an end that resolves the problem or situation posed at the beginning.

Watching nature is completely different. There is no plot that we can see. There may be a beginning, a middle, and an end, but we don’t know what it is. There may be a plot, but again we have no idea what it is.

Animal and plant lives are shrouded in mystery. Same for the weather. Same for the earth. We can describe animal and plant species and identify them by name, and we can describe ecological, geological, and climatological processes, but that doesn’t always give us a complete picture of what is happening around us as we sit and watch nature at work.

I know nothing about the bee that comes to collect pollen from a flower. Yes, I can often tell you the scientific name of the bee and the scientific name of the flower, but I know nothing about the rest of their lives. Where does this bee live? What does the bee do all day? What challenges does the plant with the flower face from other species of plants? These are all mysteries.

And so I can watch nature in the “Now” moment, observing what is going on without any expectations. Being in the “Now” moment allows me to be at peace with my surroundings, and witness without criticizing what I am seeing.

On the other hand, when I go to a Harry Potter film, I expect to be entertained by a plot, and I criticize when I am not. I still consider myself a Harry Potter fan, so I’m going to look forward to the next film after this one, but in the meanwhile I find watching nature much more interesting and engaging.

July 05, 2009

For several days now, as I have been taking my dog for a
walk around a pond at the local state park, I have been assaulted by a deer fly
(family Tabanidae). The fly always starts buzzing me in the same 30 meter (100
feet) stretch of path, where the acacia trees provide some shade and the winds
blow gentle puffs of air.

The fly seems to have a very circumscribed territory. Once I
get out of that 30 meter stretch, he breaks off his attack and
disappears, only to reappear during my next circuit on that path.

I try to put myself into the world of this fly. I am
guessing that his world is encompassed in a plot of land that has a diameter of
30 meters. This is all that he knows. This is all that he sees. At random
unpredictable times, potential meals move into range, triggering a hunger
response. Outside that range, potential meals vanish, as if they never existed.

With my superior vision, I can see the whole pond, and I can
think that it is very quaint that the fly cannot realize that simply going
outside his 30 meters would give him more potential meals. He is limited by his
perception, in ways that I am not.

But then I think, how much are we humans limited by our
perception? Many years ago, I met a farmer who had not traveled more than 20
kilometers (12 miles) from where he had been born 70 years previously. Now many
of us travel around the globe fairly effortlessly, and we can use electronic
means of perception to see what is happening anywhere in the world.

But our solar system is huge, our galaxy is larger, and our
universe is larger still. We can’t see anything of what is happening there,
with a few paltry exceptions of Hubbell telescopes and rockets sent to other
planets.

Like the fly, our world is circumscribed. We can see much
more than the fly, but in the larger scheme of things, our perception does not
extend out much more than his, in terms of cosmic distance.

To paraphrase a Hermetic saying, “As below, so above.”We and the fly have much in common. We both
can only see a very small portion of reality. And as we delve into quantum
physics, we are not very sure what really is reality. Perhaps there are
intelligences greater than ours who think that it is very quaint that we cannot
realize that by simply going beyond the limits of our current perception we can
see a greater reality. Or perhaps not.

I don’t know if the fly worries about such questions.
Current scientific thought would suggest that he is not capable of such
thoughts. And perhaps we too are not
capable of thoughts that would transcend our reality, allowing us to see a
larger world.

So what to do? In my case, I am simply going to enjoy my
moment in Nature, and even though the fly wants to suck my blood, I am going to
enjoy his buzzing, even as I wait for my steps to take me out of his range.

July 05, 2008

At the beginning of summer, my wife opened up our outdoor grill, only to find that paper wasps (Polistes arizonensis) had built a nest hanging from the upper grill shelf. The nest formed a disk that was about 5 cm (about 2 inches) in diameter. She quickly closed the grill cover and came to ask me to do something about the wasps.

We did not want to kill them, so I thought that if I left the grill cover open, the heat of our summer days would drive the wasps to abandon the nest. I opened the grill cover in the early morning, when the temperature was still cool and the wasps were not active. Since the temperature really soars during the heat of the day, I thought it would take the wasps only a few days to leave their nest.

Every day I watched them through our kitchen window to see what they would do. Rather than abandoning the nest, the wasps took their exposure to the sun in stride. During the heat of the day, they would all cluster on the underside of the nest, in the shade. As the sun started going down and the temperature started cooling off, they would crawl up to the topside of the nest and absorb some heat for the coming cooler night.

For the next month, I watched the wasps building up and maintaining their nest. The diameter of the nest is now about 13 cm (about 7 inches), and the wasps show no inclination to slow down their activity.

But now the Arizona monsoon is gathering. This is a time of violent rainstorms and thunderstorms. Each morning during the monsoon the day dawns clear and sunny, but by noon the clouds gather and the rain starts, lasting in fitful bursts of moisture through the early evening hours, and sometimes throughout the night.

I know that the rains are coming, and when they arrive, the paper construction of the wasp nest will be destroyed. Yet the wasps continue unfazed by the coming prospect of losing their nest.

I can say that the wasps are operating on sheer instinct and have no prior knowledge of the coming debacle that will engulf their home. But then I think of how we humans do exactly the same thing, even though we supposedly are aware of the consequences. I remember watching villagers build houses of out lava on the slopes of a still-rumbling and smoking volcano in Guatemala. And I lived in San Francisco, where everyone knows that a big earthquake is going to arrive someday, but everyone hopes that it won’t be during their time.

We humans live in perilous places and we hope for the best. Perhaps the wasps are also hoping for the best. (I’m sure that some dogmatic scientists will say that wasps are not capable of hope, to which my reply is, how exactly do you know this, other than through your unverified opinion?).

But it does show that we humans and the wasps have something in common: We all are reluctant to leave behind the place that we call home.